Making mass murder easy
It becomes clearer with each revelation about the San Bernardino massacre that America has made itself a soft, wide target for murderers, including Islamist radicals, which is what it increasingly appears the two killers in this case were. Murder here is easy to commit — because weapons and ammunition that tear at human flesh are easily obtainable. And once murder is committed, it is far harder to solve than it should be — because the devices that are repositories for incriminating evidence are increasingly beyond the reach of law enforcement.
Police on Thursday reported that all four weapons used by killer Syed Farook and his wife-accomplice, Tashfeen Malik — two assault rifles and two handguns — were bought legally.
The two had a guerrilla-sized stockpile at home: a staggering 2,000 rounds of 9-mm. bullets and 2,500 rounds of .223-caliber rifle ammunition.
Also in the home: 12 pipe bombs and hundreds of tools that could be used to build IEDs or pipe bombs.
In what country is it legal to collect enough weaponry to go to war? In ours, thanks to gun laws crafted and protected by lawmakers obedient to the National Rifle Association.
In a sane world, Farook may well have been barred from buying a weapon legally — which would have forced him at least to risk arrest by looking to arm himself on the black market.
We know this because, also yesterday, officials revealed that Farook had been in active touch with people being investigated by the FBI for international terrorism.
This is precisely the type of activity that lands individuals on the FBI’s terror watch list. Yet Congress, bowing to the NRA, refuses to prevent those on the list from buying guns — resisting a proposed ban that President George W. Bush wisely started pushing in 2007.
Sen. Chuck Schumer brought the matter to a vote yesterday. It failed, as did a fresh effort to impose universal background checks on gun sales.
Which brings us to the second way America is its own worst enemy in the fight against gun-fueled mass murder, including of the terrorist kind.
Virtually all contemporary communications take place via cell phone, computer or tablet. (Landlines are potentially subject to wiretaps and, at least until recently, had suspect metadata — from and to phone numbers — collected by the NSA.)
Yet monitoring of Internet chats, calls and file exchanges is spotty, and all these are increasingly migrating to encrypted channels out of law enforcement’s reach.
Police in San Bernardino recovered thumb drives, hard drives and cell phones from Farook’s home, from which they may well be able to obtain leads about the couple’s motives and track down potential collaborators and instigators.
None of that recovery would be possible had all the information been stored on an encrypted device like those now being sold by Apple and Google. Not even with a warrant, or two, or 20.
They can only be unlocked by their owner. Even if their owner has just been killed having completed a suicide terrorist mission. Madness.